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The significance of the Blagojevich story isn't really that of a corrupt Illinois governor. There has been no paucity of these in the Land of Lincoln. The previous governor, a Republican in his mid-70s named George Ryan, is currently doing time for corruption. Corruption in Illinois may be the only true bipartisan politics practiced in the nation. As for Blagojevich, who is now in his second term of office, he is a man of monumental unsubtlety. When asked on the David Letterman Show if he thought Blagojevich ignorant or just nuts, John McCain said that he thought him "a rare blend of both." Everything about Blagojevich seems fraudulent, including his ambitiously coiffed hair, which turns out to be real.

No, the significant story buried within an old and obvious corruption story is what many people suspect will be the end of yet another American political family, the Jacksons of Chicago, Illinois. From what has thus far been released of Patrick Fitzgerald's report about Blagojevich's prospective buyers, we know that Jesse Jackson Jr. was mentioned on the telephone tapes as Candidate 5, and that serious money might appear on his behalf to pay for the president-elect's vacant Senate seat. Later it came out that an Indian-American businessman named Raghuveer Nayak, who has sought influence for the pharmaceutical and surgical centers he owns and runs, had offered to raise a million dollars to obtain the Senate seat for Jackson. According to the New York Times, Nayak had earlier contributed more than $200,000 to Blagojevich's various campaigns and at least $22,000 to Jackson's.

Whether Nayak offered to buy the Senate seat with Jackson's approval or not is unknown. Jackson claims to have no knowledge of it. Nayak may well have thought how pleasing to present the gift of a Senate seat, and how delightful, not at all by the way, to own a United States senator. In America, as we know, everything is possible.

More by Joseph Epstein

Either way, if Jackson knew or didn't know, his career has been badly tainted. "He'll never serve in the United States Senate," an Illinois legislator said. On CNN, Jackson, himself has said that he is fighting for his life, by which of course he means his political career, though the two, life and career, in so thoroughly politicized a man, may well be coterminus.

Jesse Jackson Jr. has long had a serious problem, whose name is Jesse Jackson Sr. On the one hand, he owes his career to his father; on the other hand, his father is a bit--and often more than a bit--of an embarrassment. When his father, unaware that he was talking into a live microphone, mentioned his desire to castrate Barack Obama for lecturing blacks on the responsibilities of fatherhood, the son had to repudiate the father. In personal style, in manner, Jesse Jackson Jr. has quietly attempted to establish himself as apart from (if not be the actual anti-) Jesse Jackson Sr.

One of the richest fruits of Barack Obama's presidential victory for many is that it seems to spell the demise of Jesse Jackson Sr. as a major player in American politic life. With the rise of Obama, the Reverend Jackson--always at the factory gates, hovering over the graves of celebrities, inviting himself to speak wherever television cameras are humming--looks drearily dated, practicing a politics that seems antiquated and unnecessary, a dead letter walking. Jackson Sr. survived all the piquant scandals (his description of New York as "hymietown," his fathering a child with a woman not his wife, all the accusations of loose bookkeeping at Operation PUSH, the beer distributorships that seem to have fallen into the lap of his family), but he now seems to have been done in by history. His politics of victimhood, of moral blackmail, of dubious martyrdom have all, one hopes, been extinguished by the new president-elect, who, insofar as possible, admirably eschewed almost all mention of race through his long campaign.

The historical scenario called for the Reverend Jackson to shuffle off to Buffalo and for Representative Jackson to come on stage, all wonky earnest and nonministerial, the very model of the new African-American politician, 21st-century edition, bound for who knew what great things. But one cannot finally escape one's origins, and for a politician, when these origins happen to be the city of Chicago, state of Illinois, they are, as Jesse Jackson Jr. is discovering to his chagrin, even more difficult to escape. He may well have to serve out the rest of his political life languishing in the House of Representatives, a bleak fate this for an immensely ambitious young politician.

Joseph Epstein, a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is the author most recently of Fred Astaire (Yale University Press).